City‐scale urban sustainability: Spatiotemporal mapping of distributed solar power for New York City

Research into urban sustainability increasingly deploys advanced analytics and large‐scale data to investigate possible sustainable energy options. This paper reviews several available data‐driven approaches that answer urban sustainability questions. One such approach is applied to identify energy consumption and rooftop photovoltaic (PV) generation potential in New York City at the electricity network level with the objective of improving the city's resilience to expected impacts of climate change. Electric system resilience is, in part, dependent on the spatial and temporal distribution of consumption and potential sustainable energy generation which is investigated here by separating the city into 68 electricity networks and evaluating their generation‐consumption interaction pattern. The analysis reveals that New York City could be home to about 10 GWp of rooftop solar installations—sufficient to cover approximately 25% of annual city electricity consumption and 53% of daylight hour consumption. Localized electricity import–export dimensions are explored for each of the 68 electricity networks and we identify an excess 3.1 TWh electricity supply per year if the entire technical potential of rooftop solar PV is deployed. This excess electricity supply is roughly equivalent to an annual $734 million value which could benefit low‐income areas in the city. This article is categorized under: Energy Infrastructure ≥ Economics and Policy Photovoltaics ≥ Systems and Infrastructure Energy Infrastructure ≥ Systems and Infrastructure Photovoltaics ≥ Economics and Policy